Pyneing for the Right student politics

On 29 August, Christopher Pyne weighed into the exciting world of student politics, decrying, in an op ed for the Australian, an upsurge of campus anti-Semitism supposedly spearheaded by the activist group Socialist Alternative.

‘Students,’ Pyne warned, ‘have been targeted physically and verbally just because they are Jewish.’

It’s no small thing for the Education Minister to publicly identify the universities within his portfolio as seedbeds of racialised violence. You’d think that, to justify such an extraordinary allegation, there’d be some – oh, I don’t know – evidence.

After all, Socialist Alternative produces a weekly newspaper and holds meetings across the country. As any protest attendee knows, its supporters are not shy explaining their ideas. If SA members were really the pogromists that Pyne claims, surely he could point to instances of bigotry within their own publications.

Yet, amid boilerplate rightist rhetoric about the menace of BDS, Pyne offered only one specific allegation.

‘Recently,’ he said, ‘five Jewish students were refused entry to a Socialist Alternative discussion on Israel because they were Jewish and were told “only progressive-thinking people are allowed”.’

Last Friday, when the Age reported Monash University Student Association’s deregistration of the local Socialist Alternative club, one would be excused for thinking Pyne and the AUJS entirely vindicated.

Why, if MSA had declared SA ‘prejudicial to the interests of clubs and societies’, it could only be because of its racist door policy, right?

SA was directed to a Misconduct Hearing over allegations that their representatives had denied the entry of Monash University students to a club event held on July 30 2014, after the students in question refused to sign a petition relating to the current conflict in Gaza. […]

Affiliated clubs receive a range of resources from the Monash Student Association … In consideration of this, it was the opinion of the C&S Executive that the actions constituted conduct that was prejudicial to the interests of C&S – a category of Club Misconduct – given that Monash University students had been denied attendance at a club event on the basis of their unwillingness to sign a document relating to a matter of political opinion.

The students weren’t, in other words, barred because they were Jewish. They were barred because of their politics.

MSA apparently considers political exclusions an offence worthy of deregistration – which seems to imply, rather bizarrely, that the Liberal Club couldn’t sit without inviting Labor students to join its deliberations.

Leaving that aside, the C&S statement explicitly contradicts Pyne’s version of events. You might disagree with banning political opponents from a meeting – but you can scarcely call it anti-Semitic.

Why should anyone outside Monash University care about campus hijinks?

Certainly, university politics is – and always has been – ill-mannered, bad-tempered and, sometimes, overheated. Pyne could talk to his prime minister about that: the young Tony Abbott was, of course, notorious as a hard man on campus. A few years back, the Age gave a glimpse of the Abbott style:

‘He was a very offensive, a particularly obnoxious sort of guy,’ said Barbie Schaffer, a Sydney teacher who was at Sydney University with Mr Abbott.

‘He was very aggressive, particularly towards women and homosexuals’.

Published university reports show that after a narrow defeat in the university senate elections in 1976 – Mr Abbott’s first year of an economics-law degree – he kicked in a glass panel door.

In the ensuing two years, he was repeatedly accused in the university paper of being a right-wing thug and bully who used sexist and racist tactics to intimidate his opponents.

Lawyer David Patch, who is a Labor candidate in the federal seat of Wentworth, recalls an AUS conference in the mid-1970s, which had initiated a special ‘women’s room’ for females to discuss political issues.

‘Tony used to stand outside the women’s room with his right-wing mates and loudly tell sexist and homophobic jokes,’ he said.

‘University administrations,’ said Christopher Pyne in his Oz op ed, ‘should be very careful not to invoke freedom of speech to allow speech that vilifies students.’

Yes, vilification is a bad thing. We should have no tolerance for those who, say, lurk outside the women’s room telling poofter jokes.

But that’s not what Pyne means. His warnings about the dangers of free speech reflect a larger trend, a concerted effort – in the wake of a Gaza campaign that appalled millions – to delegitimise critics of Israel, particularly on campus.

So, for instance, in the US, the University of Illinois has withdrawn a job promised to Professor Steven Salaita because of his anti-Israel tweets. The board of trustees later explained it sought a ‘university community that values civility as much as scholarship’ – an extraordinary claim that implied a concern for scholarly inquiry only so long as the results don’t offend anyone.

The Middle East remains one of the major issues in international politics today. It’s a question that needs more discussion, not less, if we’re ever to arrive at peace.

Naturally, supporters of Israel don’t like to hear their views challenged. But that’s too bad. Politics, whether on campus or anywhere else, entails debate – and it’s shameful to use bogus allegations of anti-Semitism to shut your opponents down.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.

Jeff Sparrow is the former editor of Overland. He is the co-author (with Jill Sparrow) of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, the editor (with Antony Loewenstein) of Left Turn: Essays for the New Left and the author of Communism: a love story, Killing: Misadventures in violence, and Money Shot: A Journey into Censorship and Porn. On Twitter, he's @Jeff_Sparrow.

Comments

Is it safe to comment, that the fallacy of a “new world order”, was a bunch of neo-nazi, extreme elitist, multi-millionaires, who imagined that if they took the Jews side in every dispute, they would escape the label of Nazism.

Is it safe to comment, that there is content in the Bible, which alludes to the fact of the Bible becoming written down at all, instead of kept as an oral tradition amongst the ancestors of modern Jews, and the converts among ancestors of many modern Christian and Islamic patriarchies. Such content can be read to be sustaining perfect continuity with the situation, of their “new world order”, being an anathema.

Surely it is safe to comment, that the modern popularity of becoming a “Kabbalah-ist”, rather than a Yogi, or Taoist, or Wiccan, was isolated to mainly corrupt super wealthy perverts. Uh oh, no, not so safe, I might be considered an anti-semitic in that case. Looks like the ultra wealthy right wing, want to belong in the “most oppressed” category, just as much as any socio-path in the prisons… the poor things!

To the best of my knowledge, no revolutionary socialist targets a person, or a person’s faith or heritage, because that person is Jewish. Revolutionary socialists target extreme nationalism and extreme nationalists.

Just as questioning the actions of our own government, does not make one anti-Christian, or questioning the actions of the Myanmar Junta, does not make one anti-Buddhist, opposing the Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza does not make one anti-Jewish.

I think the reason they were banned is just as bad – somewhat embarrassing and extremely juvenile for a political student group. “Sign our form or we won’t let you join our meeting…”. Very democratic…

But I completely agree that Tony Abbott is immature even now and must have been a really obnoxious dickhead at uni. The only problem is the Socialist Alternative is the “student Tony Abbott” of today. All yelling, no debate, and just as immature.

Nobody should be banned from attending any meeting anywhere in Australia at any time because of their race their religion, their gender or their ‘politics’. Free speech requires an ability to speak and to hear what is being said – anything else builds the road to totalitarianism. TA has nothing to do with this issue and your inability to curtail your bigotry against him earns this under graduate piece – a fail.

So you’d be for letting neo-Nazis attend a meeting of, say, the refugee action collective? Or, to take Jeff’s rather less extreme example, members of the young Liberals attend meetings held by the Labor clubs on campus?

IMO it’s a no brainer. Meetings held by groups like Socialist Alternative, along with coalitions like Students for Palestine, constitute one of the ONLY places in our society where it is possible to escape, for a moment, from the wall-to-wall advocacy of the Israeli perspective in these debates, and to create an environment where e.g. students from an Arab or Muslim background may feel comfortable to express their views without fear of being further vilified as an ‘extremist’.

If we allow people into these meetings who are attending solely with the idea of disrupting any real discussion of how Palestine solidarity campaigners can effectively organise – then we are, actually, undermining ‘free speech’ in a broad sense.

But don’t let rational arguments get in the way of a good-old fashioned anti-socialist smear campaign!

It’s true in some respects. They should send moles to these meetings rather than attend overtly. That way if a terrorist attends a meeting and feels comfortable enough to encourage people to mimic the terrorist activity of the “Weathermen” in 1970 the proper authorities can be informed.